GoDaddy Review

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar and web hosting provider with over 12 million customers worldwide. GoDaddy also provides dozens of other cloud based solution for small and medium sized businesses. Today GoDaddy hosts more than 57 million domains and has proven to be the most reliable web hosting provider with excellent round the clock customer support and features. GoDaddy’s pricing is very flexible giving webmasters more room to expand and grow their online businesses.

A full website services provider renowned as one of the biggest and most widely used on the web, thanks to savvy marketing backed up by quality domains and hosting plans.

There’s no escaping Internet giant GoDaddy. One of the most well-known and widely publicised providers on the planet, the firm began life as a simple domain registrar before rapidly expanding to become an all-powerful one-stop resource for all of our website needs.

Positioning themselves as the provider of choice for starts up and small businesses of all shapes and sizes, GoDaddy’s value proposition is that they have everything people need to set up their business on the web, without needing much in the way of technical know-how or vast sums of money.

But wait, don’t many other leading hosting companies do that too? Isn’t that the primary purpose of a shared hosting platform, and if so, how does GoDaddy stack up against its competitors?

In the following guide, our experts will attempt to answer all of those questions and more by detailing everything you could ever need to know about GoDaddy as a web hosting provider.

GoDaddy’s bargain shared hosting plans do represent great value for money for small businesses who need a powerful web presence on a limited budget. To that end, we couldn’t rate the brand high enough, but sadly, a few customer service issues and periods of downtime keep them way off the top of the hosting charts.

Plans and Pricing

Shared Hosting Plans

Along with Domain Registration Services Godaddy also provide Web Hosting, SSL, dedicated servers and Reseller Hosting services. In article we’ll review Godaddy shared hosting plans and services. In this review, we’ll discuss about Features like number of websites, website space, bandwidth, included domains, email accounts on Godaddy shared hosting plans. Godaddy has 3 different shared hosting plans and we will be talking about all three;

Whilst more and more companies are adopting the comprehensive, one-size fits all shared hosting model, GoDaddy continue to buck the trend by staying true to their original three-tier hosting plans.

At the bottom end of the scale, the £3.99 package is perhaps best suited for small websites and those with very basic needs. This provides 100GB for a single website, with 100 email addresses and a free one year’s domain registration. The Economy package increases by 20% to just £4.99 once the first term expires.

Contrarily, the mid-level Deluxe plan actually boasts a bigger first term discount of 50%, meaning for a first term at least, you get more than the economy package for less money. For £2.99 (later increasing to £5.99), you’re looking at unlimited storage for as many websites as you can manage, along with 500 email addresses and the standard free domain name.

Last but not least, the £4.99 Ultimate plan packs the biggest punch, doubling the amount of email addresses and including additional processing power and memory, Premium DNS for greater performance and security, and a free 1 year SSL certificate, which is invaluable not only to keep data safe on eCommerce websites, but also to improve search rankings and provide overall peace of mind for your visitors.

Money Back Guarantee

Unlike some hosts which offer a full refund on all hosting plans regardless, GoDaddy’s money back guarantee all depends on the kind of term you took out when you first signed up with them.

For example, if you sign up for a yearly plan, then you have the standard 45 days to ask for your money back if you’re not happy with the service. After that 45 day period, you’ll only be able to claim ‘in store credit’ to be used against other GoDaddy services.

However, if you take out a monthly plan, then you’ll only have 48 hours in which to claim your refund.

Key Features

What’s included in the GoDaddy Shared Plan?

Free one-year domain name

Free email accounts

Easy to use cPanel dashboard

1-click WordPress Installation

Database backup and restore function

GoDaddy Features

The good news is that regardless of the hosting plan you choose, you’ll enjoy unlimited bandwidth, which is absolutely crucial to prevent any downtime issues that could otherwise be caused by bandwidth restrictions.

Support for Perl, Python, PHP 5.4 and 5.5 and Secure Shell (SSH) Access are also standard features of all three plans, as are site stats, access logs, database restore and backup and online file managers.

If you prefer to use FTP to upload your site, you’ll benefit from 50 accounts on both Economy and Deluxe, whilst the Ultimate package removes any restrictions on how many accounts you can have.

The same applies to MySQL databases, with just 10 available in the Economy, 25 in Deluxe, and unlimited databases on Ultimate.

One of the things we do love about GoDaddy is that we can use as many email addresses as we like with their shared hosting plans, and that the Office 365 application that comes free with some plans is very easy to set up and manage.

This is also true of the back-end navigation. GoDaddy uses the popular cPanel dashboard to help you set up, manage and maintain your site. As you’ll already know if you’ve ever hosted a website before, few tools make looking after your website as easy as cPanel, and we’re glad to see it featured here.

Building a Website

The type of tool you’re planning to use to create your website may well determine which kind of plan you purchase from GoDaddy.

As we mentioned earlier, FTP accounts and the usual online file uploader come as standard components of the three shared hosting plans, so if you’re creating a site using desktop software and uploading it to the web once it’s done, you’re in good hands.

The same goes for those of you who are thinking of using a Content Management System such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or one of the many lesser-known platforms out there. These are all available via the handy one-click installation feature, so there’s no complicated set-up process to follow to get a powerful website up and running.

Website Builder Package

The only real snag comes for those of you who prefer to use the drag-and-drop website builders that come with most hosting packages. We say most because, unfortunately, GoDaddy don’t bundle one in with any of their plans.

Instead, they offer a separate Website Builder package which, much like the hosting itself, comes at three different prices.

£4.99 / month – You’ll have access to 50 different website templates designed for personal websites, with 1GB of storage space for your files, and a 150GB per month bandwidth allowance.

£6.99 / month – The number of templates available grows to 300, and includes business-orientated themes as well as personal ones. Disk space increases to 10GB and the bandwidth allowance goes up to 500GB.

This package also includes mobile optimization, meaning your customers can still get the full benefit of your website when accessing it via smartphones and tablet devices.

£10.99 / month – At the top end of the scale, the Business Plus package boasts the same number of themes as the £6.99 Business plan, but also includes Search Engine Optimization, an in-built social media manager and the mobile optimization feature. With this package, you’ll also enjoy 50GB of storage space and 1000GB of bandwidth.

All packages allow you to create unlimited pages and the option to add a shopping cart. That being said, if you are planning to sell products from your website, you might want to read on to find out more about GoDaddy’s eCommerce tools and take that option rather than the website builder.

Selling Online

GoDaddy eCommerce

For those of you who are planning to incorporate an online store into your website, you’ll need to look at upgrading to the higher-end Ultimate package, which at $7.99 per month (reduced from $14.99) does come with a free SSL certificate for one year only.

Alternatively, GoDaddy do offer a dedicated eCommerce package, though this fall on the more expensive side at £20.99 per month after a one-week trial. Whilst other hosting companies do offer cheaper solutions, the GoDaddy plan does at least hold its own, and includes built-in payment processing, shopping carts, a dedicated IP address and all the standard features such as a free domain name.

Reliability and Performance

In the years that we’ve hosted our own projects with GoDaddy, we can honestly say that we’ve never had a problem with security issues, and can only give credit for this to the company’s 24/7 site monitoring and a security team that industry experts hold in high regard.

Unfortunately, we can’t always say the same about the levels of reliability offered by GoDaddy’s shared hosting servers. For the most part, they do seem to be pretty on the ball, but over the past 12 months we have experienced some very notable periods where, if our sites weren’t completely down altogether, they were at least performing so slowly as to render them useless to most visitors.

In terms of stats, we’re looking at an average of 99.98% during good periods, but far less when those responsible for managing GoDaddy’s servers seem to take their eye off the ball.

Website Security

GoDaddy offers solutions to Improve your site’s availability and security. If you are looking to Secure your website data & transactions or protect your website from hackers, GoDaddy has everything you need to protect your website. In case GoDaddy’s support team suspects any hacking attempts they take necessary action to protect your account from any damage and inform you via email/call the steps they have taken.

Customer Support

For the longest time, we couldn’t praise the GoDaddy support team enough, and were almost ready to class them as entirely flawless. However, as we later discovered, this isn’t necessarily always the case.

We started experiencing some downtime issues, and found that some of the tech support guys weren’t always too eager to explain things clearly, often dishing out technical terms that would’ve had many novice site owners (and sometimes even us!) rushing for the web hosting dictionary!

That was if we could even get hold of them in the first place. Indeed, our last few attempts at getting in touch with someone at GoDaddy have had us waiting on the line for several minutes at a time. We’re only hoping this is a momentary set back for a company whose customer service used to be the very best in the hosting industry.

My Review

Pros

We’ve used GoDaddy for lots of different projects over the years and generally had a mixed experience. In the past, we’ve always found that the initial process of going from sign up to site launch was swift, simple and hassle free. In the early days, we would have also told you the company’s award-winning support team deserved every bit of the kudos they receive from other industry experts.

Whilst we can still praise the company for being one of the most easy to use services around, the same can’t be said for their support team. We won’t go on too much about our issues again here, but if you missed them earlier, you can read our thoughts by clicking on the GoDaddy’s Customer Service tab.

More positive things have to be said for the flexibility of upgrading and downgrading between different packages, meaning if you find your needs have changed since you first signed up, it doesn’t take much hassle to switch to a package that’s more suitable.

Cons

We’ve covered most of the negative aspects of GoDaddy’s shared hosting service throughout this review, but if you’re looking for a quick recap, here it is:

Occasional periods of slow performance and absolute downtime coupled with a declining quality in customer service diminish the reputation of what is otherwise a very solid, affordable and easy to use service. For the cost and simplicity, you may well want to give GoDaddy a trial run, but don’t be too surprised if they turn out to be far less than perfect.

Over to you

So that’s our verdict, but we’d love to hear what you think. Have you had a good experience with GoDaddy that you think people should know about? How about the opposite? Perhaps you were left with a sour taste after your shared hosting experience. Either way, let us know.

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Earnings Disclosure

The ratings and reviews on this website are based on performance testing (Using PingDom) and customer reviews. The prices and discounts are subject to change at any time at the discretion of web hosting companies. We review web hosting providers to help potential customers choose a reliable company. We get compensation from web hosting companies in order for us to offer this free service and useful resources.